The End of the Cruise

Well, we have closed the circle now and brought Sarah Giddings to her old mooring in Torpoint. This is where our crusie really started in August of 2011. I had managed to negotiate a two month sabbatical from work as a chance to dip out toes in the long distance thing. We loved it of course so set out to do the job properly. Now the job has been done properly and we are back where we started. Truly, the cruise can be said to be over. Sadly, the last bit was all motoring in flat calm from Fowey. Still, we will be laying her up in the Exeter Canal Basin so hope to get some last sailing in before the end of the season.

It has been a wonderful experience for us and we are planning the next one already. It is impossible to choose any one part as a real highlight unless it was our first ocean landfall at Porto Santo in the Madeira group. We can honestly say we loved nearly all of it. Even the frustrating bits like being becalmed in the western approaches are a good part of it in retrospect.

Arriving in Plymouth Sound and picking up the mooring here at Torpoint was a slightly odd experience though. All the very familiar landmarks came up along with our first proper experience of strong tides in nearly three years. The welcome here at the Harbour was very friendly as well and we were pleased to tell them that we will be taking a mooring here next year.

Next year we will be back to coastal cruising and we plan to explore Brittany as well, which will be a new cruising ground for us to visit. Of plans for further extended cruising, it will take a few years to top up the kitty. When we do go we hope to cover much the same ground but much more slowly. Time will tell.

For now, this will be the last blog post of this cruise and I will be updating things much less regularly – essentially when there is something cruise related to tell rather than of our day to day stuff in either work or coastal cruising.

Here are a few pictures of major stages in the cruise along with the parting shot of Plymouth I took in August 2011.

What it looked like when we left:

Arrival in 2014!

A few "highlights"
First view of Gibraltar at the start of the proper cruise

Cabo Trafalgar

Rabat - we leave Europe

A crooked landfall at Porto Santo

Landfall at Cabo Verde

Indian River - Dominica

Waterspout Mid-Atlantic

Landfall at Azores

First sight of Blighty after eighteen months